


Falling Through

by Dalandel



Series: Modern Middle-Earth [7]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Blood and Violence, Character Death, Child Abuse (nonsexual), Disturbing Themes, Domestic Violence, F/M, Gen, Modern AU, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, War, bad language, marital sex, not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-11 21:57:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18432902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dalandel/pseuds/Dalandel
Summary: Eöl dreams of sand and what lies beneath. His special brand of darkness is a murky mess laced with poison.The war will always follow you back home.





	Falling Through

**Author's Note:**

> This is my darkest story yet. Please make sure you've checked the tags before reading.

 

 

_If you look up, you might think we are still falling through space._

That much was true. Eöl had never seen as many stars.

They stretched like man-made patterns across the inky blackness of his eyes, stirring up the turbulent heat of the desert and the depths of the inner calms of his mind. It was an unforgiving place, that. His mind. The calm was a lie, layered currents cooling and heating each other, reality blurring with memories and imagination with cold hard truth.

_You might think we are not at war at all._

It was a stupid observation of a boy too young to know better. Eöl had watched them come into this sandy hot hell of his, screaming and kicking and eventually dying, like a perverted act of birthing them into the fucking Void. He had watched their eyes turn into grey milk in their death – and while many thought him ruthless, callous even, no one doubted he remembered all of it.

He’d ignored the urge to slap the young private, settling to pat his shoulder instead, then walked down the perimeter they’d set, ancient grains shifting under his boots – thrown the butt of his cigarette into the ever-shifting sand to glint for a while like a single red eye.

The boy – for all he was brave and youthful and optimistic in his sense of false immortality – died the very next day when his transport hit a roadside bomb.

He bled to death with his torn limbs strung around the crushed inside of the vehicle, terror and pain alternating in his eyes, fighting for ground and spreading greedily where the other lifted. Eöl pulled at misshapen metal, shouted commands over the hellish ruckus, yelled himself deaf and hoarse while his feet slipped in the red sand. He tried to talk to the boy, to keep him calm, realising too late that he couldn’t hear him anymore. Without words there was only the taste of iron left in his mouth, dust and smoke in his lungs.

It was for the better, really; to try and save him would’ve been to prolong his suffering. Less than half of them lived through that long day.

For Eöl it meant all that and eleven letters to write.

He’d seen the worst of it by then, and war could offer him little shock value; he knew how little bravery had to do with victory.

He’d seen it at its ugliest, witnessed the best and the worst of human nature amid the sandy reaches.

Out there,  you were just one man, following orders of someone following his. He’d seen enough death to sense its coming, to feel the wounds ache before they’d even marred his skin.

Out there, he’d become numb for the sake of self-preservation.

_You’ve got your little boy at home._

 

* * *

 

You could describe the smell of death – sweet, rotten, like a fruit gone bad enough you’ve trouble to recognise it anymore – but never truly explain how it lingered in your nose.

There’s a distinct, clear stench of shit to torn bowels you can never forget.

It’s the smell of fear.

There’s the strangest disbelief involved in smearing your hand through your own dinner spilling out from your slashed guts. There are about eight and half metres of intestine in a human being after all, and when you see it coming out like a sack of wurst poured on the floor, you no longer wonder why farts whistle.

It happens. It’s not the fastest way to go, but probably the worst.

But the smell of _dying_ – that’s harder.

It’s in your head, like a burnt image, and sometimes you still catch it, draw it in like a reminder that you _survived_ but you aren’t _safe_. You might be eating ice cream in a goddamn park on a nice sunny day, gobbling down sausages at the markets, or playing ball with the boys… and then the wind changes.

Suddenly, it’s a gale force blowing from some dark corner of your mind, bringing back the unexplainable – the things you have to live through to understand even in the slightest.

Then you have to check that your own guts are still in place.

If your guy dies, it’s like a piece of you dies.

Everyone knows it could have been you, but no one’s ever as aware of that as _you_.

And then they tell you to consider your stupid ass _lucky_.

Eöl is a callous, ruthless bastard, everyone knows that.

He has had to be, out there, had to learn how to keep a stoic face at a friend’s funeral, how to stand at attention, staring at the coffin like his bottom-of-the-ocean eyes could pierce holes into it.

 

* * *

 

_He’s got your eyes like they could’ve been._

Eöl knows that – the black iris has the satin gloss of a cat’s coat; shiny like a midnight wave in moonlight.

_My sweet little guy._

He spends nights silently carding through the soft silk of Maeglin’s hair, watching the stark darkness of the woods through the window. Sometimes it calms him down when his scars ache and his thoughts plummet, when he digs into the abyss he usually covers with desert sand to keep the roots of the jungle from attaching themselves into the hell beneath.

_Sick trees, sick trees._ Eöl can’t chop them down from that place. If he takes his axe there, he’ll just hang himself in the shed instead, leave his battered-healed-battered-healed-dead body for his son and wife to find. He wonders how innocence would look, leaving in a hush from Maeglin’s eyes – would they be as dead as his, from that moment on? Would he cut his father down from the beam and hold him, or would he scream and run and never mention him again?

He knows the boy’s awake from the way his small shoulders are set, how his breathing hardly lifts his blanket. He imagines the lashes flutter, almost hears Maeglin’s eyelids click against each other. They never talk, not like this.

Eöl wonders if Maeglin senses the shade present in the room and doesn’t sleep because of it. It shifts behind Eöl’s shoulder, shaped like a second father, whispers mutely into the space between awareness and sleep, bars them both from rest.

When Maeglin’s breathing evens out, it gives Eöl a sense of brief calm. Wind makes branches tap against the window frame, and somewhere far a night-beast howls for company. Such things push the world a little closer to its true aligned path, and Eöl’s heart settles down, sings a refrain for solitude.

He lifts himself up eventually, rubbing a hand over his aching hip, and slips out of the door quietly like a ghost, crossing the hallway into the bedroom.

Aredhel sighs when Eöl slides in next to her, her shoulder cool where it’s been caressed by the draft. He covers it with his warm hand, melts against the pearly spine and kisses a winding path from ear to neck. Caressing fingers wander down to rake through black curls, hair growing damp beneath his touch. He wants her like this, languid from sleep when she’s soft and yielding and welcoming, unresisting and malleable beneath his big calloused hands. Her blue eyes seek out details of his shadow-cast silhouette, lip bitten between teeth to keep herself from groaning.

To not wake up the boy.

 

* * *

 

The city is a war-torn ruin. Concrete dust, smoke, cracked walls.

If a grenade doesn’t kill you, a collapsing house might.

Still, Eöl’s made his way to the roof, perched behind some rubble with his rifle.

His breath starts as a horrid, achy huff before it slows down, acid burning inside him less and less by the second as he masters himself, regulates his body like he adjusts his weapon.

There’s a terrible sense of _dark, dark delight_ in the realisation that his hands don’t shake.

He watches the world through his scope, sees it focused and reduced in the way he prefers but rarely affords.

He is not a big shot, not yet.

The bloody glory is still ahead of him.

It whispers to him, that same shadow from Maeglin’s room, but it’s not that horrid nameless terror…   _yet_.

It’s seductive, a hellish demon with a pretty face, and Eöl _wants_ it.

Oh, how he wants to make real fucking sweet love to it. To his own future reputation, to his own inevitable downfall.

But he doesn’t know that yet.

The radio buzzes to life – a familiar voice gives orders through static, gives Eöl direction, where to point at. _Who dies today?_

When they say a human head’s like a watermelon, it’s actually pretty close to truth.

It explodes like one from a big enough round, turns into vivid colours for one passing instant before it’s a smear on the wall and road and on the shoulders and cheeks of anyone within five metres.

It’s ugly, and it’s _beautiful._

When they say a sniper is a god… that’s also true.

There’s infinite strength in the quiet of a mind which knows exactly when to squeeze the trigger, and the first heartbeat after a successful shot is made of choirs and heavenly bells.

Eöl’s triumph is everyone’s triumph, and one man’s death – the enemy’s loss.

There will be new ones to take his place tomorrow, but today Eöl is a bloody hero.

The very next day their enemy is regrouped and prepared, and his unit loses four men.

He holds one of them through his death, witnesses the moment stretch and wither and break. The blood in his veins loses its meaning as life in his arms trickles to nothing.

_It happens._

_Soldiers die, that’s what they do._

He repeats that often enough his tongue becomes conditioned to it, the taste of bullshit so strong he eventually stops saying it. It never comforted anyone anyway.

It’s so much easier to think they’re all dying for a greater cause, one which fewer and fewer of them remember by the end of the day.

 

* * *

 

“I wish you wouldn’t drink in front of him,” she says, her face tight, fingers busy plucking the bird in her lap. Eöl looks up at her from his armchair. The world seems less brittle, blurred up like this. Aredhel looks younger too, despite the worried lines around her mouth – more like the girl he married.

He says nothing, occupying his mouth with the rim of his bottle instead.

 

* * *

 

Eöl isn’t a coffee shop person. It’s a several hours drive to the nearest one, but sometimes he takes it – but never without a reason.

_Bad intel,_ he writes, cup of coffee growing cold beside him. Light leaks in through the dirty windows; the air smells like pancakes.

_It wasn’t on me._

_You have full testimonials from my men._

 

_You broke the chain of command_ ,

comes the answer a mere moment later.

_In any other situation you_ _  
_ _would have been court-martialed, LT._

Eöl looks at the words, feeling a sliver of anger wrap around the cold trepidation in his gut.

_You have been summoned to Tirion_  
_headquarters for mental re-evaluation._  
_You understand you will not be_  
_allowed to serve until your mental_  
_faculties have been evaluated and_  
_you are deemed suitably fit._

__

__

__

__

__

__

_This is as much as I’m willing to discuss online._

 

_And off the record?_ Eöl types.

Few things ever are off the record, of course. He goes by the book until the day he doesn’t, and this is him trying to speak as one man to another, not soldier to soldier.

_This isn’t an official exchange._

 

_Off the record,_  
_and judging by the outcome_  
_and my personal knowledge of your person,_ _  
_ _you pulled one void-of-a-trick, LT._

_Yet 11 soldiers died that day._

_You know how it is._

 

_It’s war._

Eöl’s eyes narrow at the hypocrisy; his fingers pick up their pace, drumming away with simmering fury.

_Decisions might be made between_  
_fat men sitting in their pristine_  
_halls but they will never know_  
_what it looks like in the field._

__

_They never shed a drop of blood._

 

_It’s about politics, Eöl, image and bureaucracy._  
_If you want to get back out there,_  
_conduct yourself with honour_  
_and accept some of the blame –_  
_and with enough pride and skill_  
_they won’t think you incompetent,_ _  
_ and you should be cleared.

_Be well._

Eöl paid for an hour, but he isn’t staying – throwing another bill on the keyboard, he leaves, jumping behind the wheel once more.

\---

Big men and women in Tirion find no reason to discharge him, in the end. For a man of his age, he’s in peak condition, fast and smart and strong, showing no remorse nor weakness, carrying himself with rare pride.

No one sees him take a swig from his flask in the parking lot.

 

* * *

 

The mattock carves into the soil, sinks into the ground to reap fragrant blackness from beneath the yellowed, dead grass. Eöl’s arms work hard, his bare back glistens with sweat. He’s promised the plot’s going to be ready by supper, and damn him if it isn’t.

Maeglin’s sitting on the sawbuck, scraped legs dangling off the side. The stub of his pencil moves furiously across the page of a small sketchbook Aredhel’s brother had sent to his nephew. Eöl stops digging, straightens his back. A grey stripe has crept into his black hair this last year, and the line between his brows has settled there permanently, deep like a trench.

“What are you drawing?” he asks, smiling faintly as he watches the small pink tongue withdraw behind sharp little teeth, breaking deep concentration.

Maeglin looks up. His face is serious, but when he sees his father’s smile, he answers it with his own. It’s lopsided, crooked to the left, framed by the sea of wild inky curls.

“A bomb,” the boy answers, showing the big round blob with an unmistakable fuse.

“A bomb,” Eöl repeats, then looks away, anywhere else. “You should draw birds and forest animals. Tell your mother to show you the book with different beasts.”

“Yeah,” answers Maeglin, “but I want to be a soldier. Like you. I want to travel far away and win wars.”

Eöl feels his hackles rise – the hand holding the mattock feels numb. “What do you think winning a war looks like, Maeglin?”

Maeglin looks wary for a moment, then shrugs. “I don’t know. You get a parade and a prize? Shake hands with the king?”

Strong, scarred hands close around the young, thin neck. Eöl sees terror seep into the black eyes, and for a moment something like that flutters inside his own chest as well. He shakes it off – shakes the dark head from side to side until Maeglin keens and tears escape his eyes. The sketchbook lies at Eöl’s feet, the tip of his shoe pressing it into the ground.

“This – this, boy, is what it looks like!” Eöl makes his son look into his haunted, opaque eyes, then brings his hand down across one white cheek when the black gaze averts from his, seeks the blades of grass and stomped flowers, looking for refuge. “You like what you see? You think this is for you? Time to wake the fuck up!”

Maeglin cries, terrified, and Eöl lets go of him, watches him scramble off into the woods to seek safety from the darkness within. His hand burns where it hit the soft skin, remnants of tears drying in the crevices of his palm.

He doesn’t know if he’s more disgusted with his son or himself.

For a moment Eöl stands there, staring after his own flesh and blood – so unlike, and so like him in all the right and wrong ways – and then leans down to pick up the sketchbook. He flips its pages, sees himself and Aredhel alternating with skilfully penned images of magpies and bears and moles. One image looks terrifyingly familiar – the surface of the paper shows the outline of Eöl’s medal of courage, the pen scraped over the page once pressed against the wrought metal to create a graphite etching.

He closes the book and kicks the mattock into the wall.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks later Eöl leaves, and seven months later he returns. The world grinds to a halt, stopping at the painful moment of realisation until it loses all colour and blurs. The shrapnel inside his arm and cheek hurt, but the worst is the ache inside his head. A voice which doesn’t stop.

Doesn’t stop.

It doesn’t stop.

“You get to go home,” the nurse says while she adjusts his IV, taping the needle in place. “That’s something, no?”

But nothing awaits him at home – the hopeful looks he gets as he enters the house are unwarranted, based on weakness rather than strength. They hope for nothing, and nothing is what they eventually get.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s not drunk enough to not care.

It only makes him strike harder.

And more often.

 

 

* * *

 

She _tries,_ he can see that, learns to love his new scars and endures his anger and frustration, counters with gentleness the past hardship and seduces him with the safety of her arms, but Eöl can’t remember how to respond to such things.

If he stops thrusting for long enough, he can catch the shadow passing over her eyes, and he hates it, _oh how he hates it._

When it’s good, she’s all teeth and nails and Eöl lets her, bites bruises into her skin in return, and it’s like the war has entered their bed; Eöl half-expects their bodies to sink into the sand of his dreams, to find blackened roots ready to tear limb from limb and thought from thought until there’s nothing left.

He tells her to go harder, _harder,_ and her fingers close around the tuft of hair on his chest.

“I love you,” she whispers, sweat striping her rich bosom. An unspoken _let me help you_ flits upon her plush, red lips. She’s soaking wet and tightens around Eöl as he closes his fingers around the swollen nub between her legs, pinching it until she shakes.

 

* * *

 

Eöl’s mouth feels odd, like it’s frothing, and the words which slip past his lips are slurred threats of violence he’s already busy conducting, the open palm slashing into every available inch turning into a fist, harder with each hit.

It’s so much easier now that he’s lost the sight of himself.

Booze does that.

He’s hurt, so he’s _hurting_.

It all makes sense in some twisted, depraved way, and as long as Eöl’s hand stays in motion, pain bleeds out of him in clear gushes, causing him no true harm.

Maeglin’s fingernails dig into the floorboards as he tries to get away, crawling an inch until he’s brought down again, shrivelling like a rose petal into his own skin until he’s left to protect his head, curled over himself and weeping quietly.

Eöl knows in some painfully clear way that if he stops, he’ll leave and never come back.

The fingers closing around his arm are small and tight, tearing into him with the insistence of panic. He turns, unthinking, and strikes with his left hand, cursing.

Aredhel falls but gets up again with the strength and bravery of a mother whose child is in peril, tugging at the worn pant leg and belt loops until she’s back on her feet, lip bleeding into her mouth.

“Stop it,” she begs – no, _commands_. “You’re killing him!”

When Eöl turns his attention towards the boy once again, she launches at him, fingers hard hooks reaching for Eöl’s eyes, trying to scratch at them like a wounded lioness protecting her cub. Eöl’s fingers close around her wrists, hurl her away from him until she collides with Eöl’s armchair, sending her sprawling over it in a flash of black and white.

“Stay out of this,” he growls, “this is between him and me.”

Were it that it was his son Eöl’s beating. Maeglin might be the one receiving it, but each hit is meant for something else.

Past. Present. Failure. The boy who died in the AT mine blast. The stars. The soil, the mattock. The officer who signed Eöl’s discharge. The man he shot from the rooftop when he was twenty-four. Three empty bottles on the fireplace mantle.

Pain slices through his side, and he brings his hand to it, feeling the hot slick gush from a cut muscle.

The knife in Aredhel’s hand wavers, but her face is set in stone, anger so palpable it’s hotter than the sting of Eöl’s flesh. Blood pools in his palm, seeps through his shirt. For a moment he feels faint, but the action never asks for his consent. It comes, commanded by the demon inside him, and he’s upon her faster than his tortured mind can follow.

In another, better reality, he might have missed his mad window – that or Aredhel would’ve had the bravery to sink the blade into his heart.

In a better world, her hate would’ve won against her love, but she is also a creature of instinct, doomed with her hopes and dreams, made strong by the bonds of motherhood and –

– and...

Maeglin’s voice is made of broken needles and fear and belief that if he shouts loud enough, Eöl will just stop and listen to him – the despair breaks into his tone but a moment later. “Stop! Stop! Please – please hit _me,_ leave her alone!”

His little face bleeds, red roses blooming beneath the white skin. Eöl doesn’t look at him.

The blade sinks, barely makes a sound as it breaches the tender skin, digs into the place just beneath the hardness of sternum, flesh there unprotected yet woven through with major arteries. A flaw too great for such perfection – wonderful softness he’s spent hours worshipping in ages past when his lips still knew of things other than the now familiar bitterness.

He watches through the blur of intoxication and calm of shock how dark blood stains the white, a fat blot growing like a puddle during rainstorm – like a rare desert flower, it opens into its majestic fullness, ripe with fell purpose.

“Eöl,” Aredhel whispers, blue eyes wide with realisation which isn’t quite there, not there yet – but _he knows,_ and lets the strength of his fingers fail the handle, allows the knife to drop just as Aredhel does.

Maeglin screams. He scrambles to his mother, clumsy yet gentle in his heartbreak, his own hurt forgotten – his fingers find the hole in her chest which doesn’t _belong,_ press into it to stop the blood from flowing in thick bursts, lazier and lazier as seconds pass by while her eyes hold Maeglin’s, sapphires and aquamarines and lagoon waters meeting deep spaces and polished slates and chipped onyx hearts.

_Lómion_

_Lómion_

_Lómion_

Her breaths can be counted with less than ten digits, and each she wastes on the name she gave her son before he’d even cried his first.

It’s over too soon, yet it feels like the world could’ve been undone ten times before three becomes two, and the two are torn asunder forever, separated by the edge of a shining blade that once reflected the countless stars on a faraway desert.

\----

“Son,” Eöl says, colour draining from his face. He runs his bloody fingers through his overgrown hair and turns away, breath leaving him with an anguished cry – the next moment he sits in his armchair, never minding that his blood is staining it. “Fetch the police.”

At least for once it’s clear what he deserves. For once he knows that the road to Void is clear, paved just for him.

And for the poor devil of a son who’s staring at him with wide eyes, dying faith spreading like poison through that once gentle soul who once understood death as little as Eöl understands love.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Raiyana for making this so much better.


End file.
